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In this Center for Fiction event, Padma Viswanathan, author of Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime (7.13 Books, 2024), and Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest (HarperOne, 2024), discuss their memoirs and how they broke genre conventions to craft their stories.
In this 2023 event co-presented by Bellevue Literary Review at the Center for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips reads from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Night Watch (Knopf, 2023), and discusses setting her story during the Civil War in West Virginia in a conversation with editor Danielle Ofri. “History gives us the facts, but literature tells us the story,” says Phillips. “The characters access the meaning of history for us.”
In this installment of the Creative Writing and Critical Thought series, novelist Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021), speaks with professor Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso Books, 2013), about the complexity and consequences of translation and the paradoxes and power of language. The series is cosponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction.
“I try my hand at remembering. An origin story is what you make of it. It can be a culture, a treasured heirloom, or a history, reduced.” In this Center for Fiction event, Hafizah Augustus Geter reads from her book The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin (Random House, 2022) and speaks with New York Times Magazine staff writer and author J Wortham. For more from Geter, read “Twelve Ways to Create Space to Write No Matter Where You Are” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“This whole thing has been a great big fat lesson in just be yourself.” In this Center for Fiction event, Dawn Winter talks about writing her debut novel, Sedating Elaine (Knopf, 2022), with her editor Jenny Jackson, vice president and executive editor at Knopf.
This virtual round-robin reading of new Asian American fiction features Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives (Counterpoint, 2021), Jackson Bliss, author Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Melissa Chadburn, author of A Tiny Upward Shove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), Tracey Lien, author of All That’s Left Unsaid (HarperCollins, 2022), and Soon Wiley, author of When We Fell Apart (Dutton Books, 2022). The event was hosted by the Center for Fiction and presented in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
“It is a new kind of survivor narrative, one that I wish that I had when I was growing up,” says Chantal V. Johnson about her debut novel, Post-traumatic (Little, Brown, 2022), in this reading and conversation with Torrey Peters at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.
Madhu Kaza and Jeremy Tiang speak about their “slow, long fall into translation” and how writing and literary translation are forms of encounter in this conversation for the Literary Translation Clinic series, presented by the Center for Fiction and Cedilla & Co.
“To what and whom am I responsible when translating this text?” In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Brazilian literature translator Katrina Dodson offers ways to consider a practical philosophy of translation and speaks with translator Heather Cleary about questions and ways to approach the work. The Literary Translation Clinic is a monthly series of open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.
“To me, [revision] is about the majesty of failure,” says Kiese Laymon in this conversation about the newly revised edition of his debut novel, Long Division (Scribner, 2021), with Peter Ho Davies for the Center for Fiction.
